


last grasp (at the life worth living)

by restlesslikeme



Category: Punisher (Comics), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon NON compliant, M/M, Temporary Character Death, Vigilantism, Vignettes through the years, brief instances of canon typical violence, max the dog is there, no particular comic verse but i do love bernthal frank so consider that i guess, peter is a grown ass man, this is vague universe-wise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 00:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21485668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/restlesslikeme/pseuds/restlesslikeme
Summary: After so much time the seams begin to split a little bit. People come and go, and Frank stays one of them. He’s still a force of nature, but now he’s a familiar one; Pete can predict when the storm of him might roll in, and he’s right about half the time.
Relationships: Frank Castle/Peter Parker
Comments: 10
Kudos: 67





	last grasp (at the life worth living)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PepperPrints](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperPrints/gifts).

> please assume that if you ever see me posting peter parker fic, he is a grown ass man with no connection to whatever the hell marvel is doing ~cinematically. i also haven't read comics in like, years now, so all of this is very loose.
> 
> i realize that this pairing is... very niche. i hope you enjoy it anyways.
> 
> title from the song house of smoke and mirrors by matt good.

There’s a light on in Frank’s apartment window.

Pete notices it from the street, stepping up out of the subway stairs across from Frank’s building. It didn’t feel right to swing, and if he’s here for the reason he thinks he is, it makes more sense to be bundled up for the walk home anyways.

There’s a light on in the window, but there’s no movement -- no shadows. That feels more final than the news report that’s been running on the tv all night. With a sick twist, Pete realizes that he left too quickly to bother turning it off, that it’s still filling his own apartment with its dull noise. That he’s going to have to hear it again when he walks back in the door. Shaking his head, Pete treks up the stairs, patting down pockets as he goes until he feels his palm jangle keys. 

“Asshole,” Pete mumbles to himself, fumbling to unlock the front door and blaming it on the December chill in his fingers. “If I came all the way out here for no reason --”

The handle turns, the door opens. No hit to the spider sense, although he wasn’t expecting one. Even if Frank were here, he hasn’t set that off in a long time.

But Frank isn’t here -- nothing but silence greets him on the other side of the door.

The foyer is dark, but the dim glow from the light in the bedroom is enough to see that the place is the same. Stepping in and closing the door behind him, Pete flicks a switch. Same spartan living conditions; the white walls, the functional furniture. No pictures or notes stuck to the fridge when he turns into the kitchen -- nothing that would immediately identify Frank at first glance. Nothing big he would miss, if he needed to relocate without notice.

Well, almost nothing.

“Come out,” Pete calls defeatedly, closing his eyes to hear how his rough his voice sounds when it cuts through the silence. “It’s alright, it’s just me.”

Immediately, a thump, then the heavy patter of paws against the floor. Pete crouches down just in time for the dog to barrel into his torso as he flies into the room, old but still spry, his head soft and velvety under Pete’s hands as he rubs him down.

“He left the light on for you, huh?” Pete manages, rubbing his tired face into Max’s thick neck. Even dead, Frank wouldn’t leave him in the dark, and besides -- he’d have known that a light would bring Pete upstairs. Max’s muzzle is flecked with white, but he soaks the attention up like a puppy, leaning into the touch with a whine. “At least that makes one of us.”

He sweeps the apartment because he doesn’t know what else to do. He finds a book in the bedroom, with an old scrap of envelope saving Frank’s spot, obviously unfinished, and he holds onto that. Rifling through drawers turns up a couple of polaroids: a city skyline taken from an impossible height, Max and Frank passed out together on the couch, a red mask tossed on a bedside table. There’s another photo, too, older and yellowing in comparison, tucked behind the rest. Three smiling faces, forgotten except for this.

“Asshole,” he murmurs softly again, shaking his head. The sentiment of it threatens to leave him unsteady; Frank and his mementos. Tucking the photos into his jacket, Pete makes himself move on. He takes a couple of shirts from the dresser and the war journals from where they’re stashed at the back of the closet. Max’s dishes and half a bag of food. All of it goes into a duffel.

He shuts the lights off before he leaves, the bedroom first, then the kitchen, until he’s standing in the doorway with Max leashed at his side. 

“Okay,” he says, fingers hovering over the final light switch. “Okay.”

Then, with an unsteady breath, he shuts that one off too.

\--

The first time it starts -- the very first time -- he’s in the back of a car that Frank’s using for some kind of a stakeout. It’s dark, and Frank’s lead is turning out to be a deadend, and maybe that’s why he doesn’t kick Peter out onto the street. Pete would like to think it’s because even the Punisher, in all his grit and gloom, could use some company now and again but it probably isn’t that. He doesn’t know him all that well, but it’s becoming explicitly clear that the guy has no interest in team-ups.

He’s been tracking Frank for a week now, waiting for the right time to sling into his way and cut him off before things get too deadly. It’s hard to resist the inherent comedy of wearing the costume in an ordinary, enclosed space though -- it’s funny for him every time, much too funny to pass up, even if Frank probably doesn’t appreciate it.

“Do you think I blew your cover?” he asks, peering over Frank’s shoulder and out the window into the dark building across the road. “You think they saw the bug-eyes in the window? Is it the red? I shoulda gone with something more low key. Undercover.”

The stakeout was dead in the water before Pete bothered to spoil it, they both know that. Frank doesn’t smile at the joke, but he makes a noise that sounds something like resignation, and Pete takes that as a win.

“You want to get some food?” he tries, not for the first time, head tilted to one side. “It’s late. You’ve been out here for hours -- you must be hungry. I know you’re not a robot, you have to eat sometime.”

Silence, for a minute, and Pete gets ready to be kicked out for real this time. It was worth a shot anyways, the way that it always is. 

Instead, Frank starts the car. 

“Don’t push it,” comes the warning, but the way Frank shakes his head as he pulls out of the parking lot says that he knows it’s useless. He sighs when Pete squirms his way up into the front seat, buckling his belt with a grin.

“Drive thru?” he asks. “I’ve always wanted to do drive thru in the mask. Please?”

The fact that Frank actually obliges feels like a boon. They sit in the parking lot, Frank behind the wheel working steadily away at a hamburger, Pete with his mask rolled up to expose his mouth, alternating between wolfing down french fries and chatting about nothing in particular.

He lets Frank drive him about halfway home -- and honestly, the fact that anonymity keeps it from being right to his doorstep is surprisingly disappointing. 

It’s an impulse he doesn’t want to examine too closely. Not yet.

\--

It doesn’t take long for the obvious problem with their arrangement to glare. Forgetting about it is even more difficult than trying to justify it away, so Pete usually veers for the third option. 

He tries to make a tiger change his stripes. 

It might even work, if he could ever keep Frank listening long enough. For all his sharpness and all the cruelty he’s capable of, Frank rarely wants to fight about anything. 

That isn’t true -- he’s just too stubborn to bother. Either he knows he’s right, or he doesn’t care that he’s wrong. Trying to convince him of anything is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone; whenever Pete tries he just ends up drained. 

There’s a no-gun rule that applies past Pete’s doorstep. For a while he didn’t even think he’d get that much ground, but Frank bends in the end. Old fashioned manners, maybe, keeping him in line when he’s under someone else’s roof -- those do show themselves every now and then.

Pete tries not to think about the possibility that it might just be Frank weighing his options. Maybe he doesn’t have enough friends left to knock another one off the list. Sometimes, that seems like the most likely circumstance. It’s hard to believe that Frank has anywhere else he could go when he chooses Pete’s couch to nearly bleed out on.

“I’m gonna lock you out one day,” Pete threatens, even as he holds out a pack of ice. “I’ve got enough problems without letting a murderer crash here, you know that?”

It was probably a mistake to let Frank in the first time; it makes the idea of turning him away in this shape hard to swallow. He isn’t stupid -- he knows where Frank came from, knows what he does when Pete loses track of him. His better nature gets the better of him anyways every time.

“Alright,” Frank assents, eyes closed as he takes Pete’s offering. Groaning, he sets it against his leg. “You do what you have to do, Peter.”

\--

Frank’s voice is a low, rough thing. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s so hard won that makes Pete linger over it so covetously; Frank speaks and Pete wants to bottle the sound no matter what he says. 

“Parker --”

Sometimes, secretly, he imagines that they met in a different world -- he thinks about what it would be like if they were normal people, leading ordinary lives. 

“Don’t start up on that again.”

Chastising. Has it been long enough that Frank can read his mind, or is he just misreading a stray lingering stare? Probably the latter -- Peter’s never grown out of running his mouth, so his silences aren’t nearly so common place. If he’s quiet for long enough, Frank might just assume the worst. Both those conversations amount to the same thing anyways.

Would this still feel the same? If they were different people, living regular lives. 

Frank spits blood into the bathroom sink and forgets to rinse it down. Coppery red on white, a stark reminder:

It doesn’t matter. They aren’t. They don’t. 

\--

After so much time the seams begin to split a little bit. People come and go, and Frank stays one of them. He’s still a force of nature, but now he’s a familiar one; Pete can predict when the storm of him might roll in, and he’s right about half the time. Every now and then he’ll still be around in the morning, bruised eyes darker under the sun that filters in through Pete’s cheap blinds. 

When this first started, the thought of Frank Castle knowing where he lived would have been a reason to panic. He’s gotten used to it since then; his apartment is more comfortable than the safehouses they used to meet at. Of course, that was back when touching Frank at all felt like a crisis of ethics -- better to leave it in places that may as well be non existent. 

He’s older now. The fights are getting fewer and farther between.

“Late for you to still be here,” Pete remarks, fingers brushing over Frank’s shoulder on his way past the table where he sits. “What is it, like eight? Eight thirty? You planning on taking me out for brunch or something?” Frank grunts in reply, shaking his head. Pete watches out of the corner of his eye while he pours himself coffee -- coffee that Frank’s made and is already drinking.

“I won’t stay.”

Pete hums, loads his own mug with sugar before he takes a sip. The mug doesn’t do a good enough job of hiding his grin -- he can tell that Frank catches it as he makes his way back over.

“Somethin’ funny?” Franks asks, but whatever gruff tone he’s going for is effectively foiled by the warmth in his eyes as he leans back, and by the way one hand comes up to reach for Pete’s waist. There’s a looseness to his posture that betrays him, and Pete can see the barest smile hiding at the corner of his mouth.

“Nope,” Pete answers, shrugging nonchalantly as Frank lets him sit down in his lap. He can feel Frank’s thumb, tracing lines over the fabric of his pyjama shirt. “Nothing funny. You seem like you were right on your way out the door, obviously.” 

Leisurely, he loops his arms around Frank’s neck. “In your sweats,” he continues. ”With your coffee. I wouldn’t want to hold you up by being funny.”

Frank laughs anyways, low and quiet and genuine like he can’t help it, and Pete feels something warm flare up in his chest. Frank laughs like it catches him offguard every time, and every time it makes Pete feel like he won something. His own smile widens, a soft contented hum leaving him when Frank’s hand moves to the back of his head, bringing their foreheads together.

“Getting pretty sick of your shit, Parker,” he mumbles, and on anybody else Pete would call it fond. 

\--

“You have a dog?”

Pete’s been in enough of Frank’s bunkers that he wasn’t expecting his actual living space to be much different. It’s the second summer, and he’s slowly wheedling his way into Frank’s life -- what little of it there is to infiltrate, anyways. The dog that comes loping forward as soon as Frank unlocks the front door is a surprise, one that’s more than welcome. 

“Max,” Frank affirms, watching as Pete immediately drops to his knees. “Yeah. I’m trying to get him to stop running for the door like that.”

“You come up with the name all by yourself? It’s super unique I’ve never met a dog with that name before,” Pete glances back and up, just enough to return Frank’s scowl with a grin, before turning back to the animal in front of him. “Max! Hi Max, hey buddy, hi...”

He’s not much older than a pup, all muscle and energy. Frank snaps his fingers and Max sits to attention, though, and when he isn’t moving around so much Pete can see the scars on his face, the tatter in his ear.

“Picked him up not too long ago,” Frank starts, his brow furrowing into a wrinkled line as. He’s slower when he speaks, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “They were using him for fights.”

Pete could have guessed as much. If the breed isn’t any indication, the sort of dogs Frank would run into on the job would clearly serve a certain purpose. “Oh, he does look vicious,” Pete agrees gravely, mockingly serious as Max eagerly rolls over to have his belly rubbed. “A real killer.”

Frank makes a noise, low and thoughtful. “He’s young enough that they didn’t ruin him yet.”

Pete glances back at him. There’s a distinct look to Frank’s face: the persistent crease in his forehead and how he deliberately keeps his focus on Max. It’s empty in a way that makes Pete chest ache, like he knows he’s given Pete the means to call him out. 

Between the two of them, it’s hard for Pete to think about anything else: Max, with his scars in all the same places Frank has them, with an instinct that could probably be trained back into him as easily as it could be smothered.

“You’re not that old,” Pete offers, as if levity ever solved anything.

“Jesus,” Frank mutters, shaking his head. “You’re really running out of excuses, huh?”

Shrugging, Pete rises to his feet. 

“No excuses,” he answers, watching the hard line in Frank’s mouth, the scowl in his eyes. “Just optimism. You should give it a shot sometime.”

\--

Pete’s never had a dog of his own, although not for lack of wanting. Ben and May never thought it was an affordable luxury, and maybe that stayed with him into adulthood more than he realized. It seemed wrong to tangle a dog up in vigilante life, to be gone to work all day then disappear at night, and then barely afford to feed himself on top of that. 

Besides, Frank had Max, so in a way Pete did too. After a little while, that seemed like enough.

Frank made sure to take care of at least one of those problems; the money he left over is more than enough to keep Max fed for the rest of his life, with plenty left over for whoever’s looking after him. It’s easier to think about it that way -- to look at it as the dog’s inheritance, rather than his own, even if the offshore accounts Frank left behind in Pete’s name say otherwise.

“Blood money,” Pete says aloud, glancing at where Max curls on the floor. He doesn’t like to keep it in his own account, preferring to transfer just enough over from where Frank left it every time he starts to get low on kibble. Let the rest of it collect dust. “I’m feeding you with blood money, pal.”

The rest of it falls into place. Max sleeps at the foot of the bed, and seems grateful for the luxury that he was never afforded before he became a Parker. He’s used to keeping to himself through the day, and somehow Pete finds time to walk him every night either before or after a patrol. Max is a little slower than he used to be, but then again so is Pete. They still manage to make it back to Max’s old stomping grounds, to pass under Frank’s window at least once on the circuit before coming home again to Queens. Each time, Max pulls at the lead, as if this will be the time Pete takes him home, as if Frank will be waiting for them just up the stairs and down the hall. 

Pete hasn’t cried yet, so maybe he thinks the same thing. Afterall, this wouldn’t be the first time Frank’s disappeared for a few weeks and then showed back up: bruised and bloodied but whole. Alive. 

There’s a grim sort of joke to be made there: Pete and the dog, waiting around for Frank to walk through the door. 

\--

As it turns out, getting in Frank’s way  _ after _ hooking up with him is just as much fun as it was before. It takes just as much work -- Frank is quiet when he wants to be, and he’s smart -- and honestly, Pete’s always kind of been glad for the challenge. It’d be a shame for Frank to get sentimental enough to go easy on him.

“Have I ever told you you’ve got a killer right hook?” Pete asks, grinning as he rubs a hand over his own masked jaw. There’ll be a bruise there in the morning, but he came out on top in the end. “You really should consider dropping the whole gun schtick. Hand to hand’s a lot more fun, and I probably wouldn’t have to crash your parties all the time.”

From where he’s webbed up, Frank glowers at him but he doesn’t reply. The sticky restraints won’t hold him for very long, but Pete doesn’t need them to -- just long enough for him to clean up the mess that Frank was planning on making.

“I know, I know,” he sighs, idly thwipping up a rifle that’s just a _ little  _ too close to the pile of neutralized goons on the other side of the room. It goes in the stack along with the rest of them, all sufficiently gummed up with webbing to be unuseable. “You’re all about permanent solutions. Murder’s  _ too _ permanent, Frankie. You can yell at me about it later.”

He’s assuming there’ll be a later -- it’d be a shame to have chased him all across town and not get anything out of it. He’s about to say as much when the sound of sirens cuts the thought short, and he shrugs at Frank as he backs away.

“You didn’t really think I was gonna just turn the other way, did you?” Pete asks. “I’m not that easy! I’ve got a job to do, too!”

“I was being optimistic,” Frank answers flatly.

It’s so funny that Pete would kiss him if it weren’t for the audience.

\--

Pete wants him to stay more often than he doesn’t, with his face buried in the spot between Frank’s neck and shoulder, when he’s trying not to remember where the worst of Frank’s scars are and trace them with his tongue.

Sometimes, just for a moment, he’ll feel something waver in the body pressed close to his. Frank will flicker under his touch, flicker and meet his reach, and Pete thinks he might want it too.

Maybe that’s what keeps them circling around each other like this, or maybe Pete’s thinking too hard about it. It wouldn’t be the worst thing he’s been accused of -- there’s been a lot, over the years -- although in this case it’s built up arguably one of his worst habits. 

Frank, in his living room. Frank, in his bed. Frank’s dirty, bloody hands gripping his hips like there’s no tomorrow. 

He wonders sometimes if he knows more about Frank than anybody left alive. Ten years -- more than that, really -- leaves a lot of space for picking things up about a person. It leaves a lot of room for blurring lines. 

Frank reads more than he talks; he carries a book with him everywhere he goes, tucked away at the bottom of a duffel bag or wedged in the glove compartment of a car. It’s a lot of old poetry, and the odd predictable war biography, but there’s fiction too: classic and contemporary, no specific genre. Books Pete read in high school English class, books on the bestseller list, books he’s never heard of -- which is saying something. 

He’ll leave them in Pete’s apartment sometimes, on the shelf next to the headboard, or on the kitchen table. If they’re around, Pete will usually end up reading them too. It’s one of the few things that Frank seems to find easy to talk about, that the warmth at the core of him seems to touch effortlessly. One of the few subjects of conversation that Pete never feels like he’s dominating. Not too much, anyways. Not as much as usual. 

He knows Frank’s routines, and how to ease him out of a night terror. He knows that there’s a gentleness in Frank’s hands that had to be relearned; and that it creeps out more often than you would think. He knows his takeout preferences, too, and that Frank can cook decently well when he can be bothered to actually do it.

When he was twenty-five, he might have called that love. Maybe that’s still what this is -- taking these quiet little pieces of someone and keeping them like a secret. Protecting them without being asked to; collecting and offering in return. They’ve carved something out together, whether they meant to or not, and Pete’s grateful for it. That could be love.

Pete’s inching closer to forty now, and he’s stopped agonizing over giving it a name. Instead it’s just a thread that’s woven its way into his life -- Frank’s presence, and his own desire for it. This mutual tie they have to each other.

\--

“ _ Shit -- “ _

This isn’t the first time. This is the third time maybe, or the fourth. With Pete’s forehead pressed down into some sparse bed in some sparse apartment Frank is using as a safehouse, he thinks it’s getting to the point where he stops keeping score. Frank moves behind him and every stroke feels like getting closer to something that Pete doesn’t have a name for yet. The way Frank fills him up is something else entirely -- pushing him to a place he didn’t know he wanted to go so badly, turning his body into something he barely recognizes.

Wanting and wanting and wanting...

“Frank,” he breathes, almost a stutter. He can feel his heart in his throat, somewhere underneath the taste of iron and sweat Frank left on his tongue. “ _ God --” _

He kept the mask on the first time, and the second. Frank never tried to take it off, thumbs always staying respectfully along the edges of the material. Sometime after that, Frank made the confession of knowing his identity anyway -- less of a confession, more a statement of fact. No apology to it, but no threat either. It was just something he needed to know, and Pete couldn’t blame him for looking into it.

The mask came off the next time, anyways. 

Forever restless, even here, he arches back to meet the next thrust and when he does he feels Frank’s mouth against his back. Lips parted, breath hot and damp against Pete’s shoulder, the kiss he presses there feels hungry. He must have his head bowed to make the placement line up. Pushing himself up and back, Pete tries to chase that contact, asking without asking, and surprisingly Frank follows immediately through. Without breaking rhythm, the hand that had been at Pete’s hip moves, and he wraps one solid arm around Pete’s torso to pull him closer.

“Better?” Frank asks, ragged and low against Pete’s ear. He sounds about as undone as Pete feels for once. When Pete’s reply comes in the form of choked noise, Frank’s grip tightens and he shudders, fitting their bodies together until there’s no space, holding Pete close as they rock together. 

It doesn’t take long after that, hand on his own cock, matching his strokes to every time Frank pushes up inside of him. He hears Frank come apart behind him, muscled arms flexing against Pete’s chest as he gasps out a raw sound, and then--

Then Pete is following, a shuddering mess in Frank’s embrace, head tipped back over Frank’s shoulder as he comes all over his own fist.

\--

If Peter thinks he’s old, he tries not to think about how Frank feels. Frank, who’d been using his body like a machine long before Pete ever pulled on a mask. Frank, who he catches limping now and again, almost imperceptibly. 

Frank, who shudders when Pete presses a thumb hard into the tight spot under his shoulder blade.

“I don’t even know how you do this,” he frowns. “I fuck mine up swinging. You take up swinging recently? You get bit by a spider and neglect to tell me?”

“Very funny.”

Pete repays the remark with another firm roll of his thumb -- firm but measured, obviously. Even as banged up as he is, Frank likely wouldn’t appreciate proportional strength pushing a hole in his skin. It’d make a good story -- here’s where I got stabbed, here’s a bullet hole, here’s where my superhero boyfriend poked me so hard that it bled.

It’s almost funny enough to make the choice of title acceptable.

“You’d tell me though, right?” he continues, shifting his weight where he sits on top of Frank. “If you got bit by a spider? Gained some latent mutation? It wouldn’t be the most fucked up thing to happen, really.”

Underneath him, Frank’s body rumbles in a way that Pete recognizes as a laugh. It fades into something lower, tired but as content as Frank gets when Pete rubs his palm over the hard line of his back.

“Who else would I tell, huh?” Frank replies, turning his head to the side. With his head rested against the pillow, he closes his eyes.

“You’d figure it out eventually anyways,” he continues. “‘Think you’ve been around long enough that you’d notice the difference.”

Humming in reply, Pete lets himself slide down from his perch. Stupid, how that kind of an admission still knocks around in his chest. As he lowers himself down to Frank’s level he leans over, rubbing his own shadowed cheek against Frank’s shoulder.

“I’d notice,” he affirms. 

\--

He sees Ben in the mirror more and more these days, in the lines around his own mouth and the grey that’s starting to pepper through his hair. He wants to be proud of that, but lately it just makes him feel like he’s running out of time. He’s the last Parker left; younger than Ben was but older than his dad ever got to be. What does he have to show for all those years?

No family. No one to share the unending cycle of chaos with, now, either. 

Just a bank account full of blood money, and a dead man’s dog. 

He keeps the radio on for Max when he leaves the apartment. There’s no real way of telling whether or not it makes him feel less lonely, but it cuts some of the guilt out of Pete’s conscience whenever he vanishes for hours on end. He would have assumed Max to be used to this sort of thing, given how often Frank must have left him alone. Instead, Max follows at his heels every day on his way out, whining at the window. So, Pete gives him some company, as best he can. Today, when he flicks the speakers on, he stiffens:

“--vigilante known as the Punisher. While there’s no confirmation on a body, it feels rather definitive. Wouldn’t you agree?” 

“I would, and you know what? I’m hoping we’re right. New York City is crazy enough without one more lunatic shooting up the streets. What did Frank Castle do for anybody? Nothing. Finally got what he deserved, I’d say! The maniac--”

Pete turns it off again, his throat tight. Max peers up at him, and Pete ruffles his ears. “You don’t need listen to that,” he tells him hoarsely. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” 

A lump forms in his throat, persisting when he tries to swallow against it. That’s the worst part of it: who else knows? Who in this whole wide world knows anything about Frank Castle, except Pete and one big, dumb dog? 

All at once, the weight of it is too much. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” Pete says, shaking his head as if that’ll clear the pressure from behind his eyes. It doesn’t help; it just seems to make things worse, loosening up everything he’d been working so hard at keeping in check. 

“You think he’d have fixed all those accounts if he was coming back?” Once he starts talking it’s hard to stop. “It’s not my fault he didn’t tell you. He knew what he was doing and he went anyway.” 

Pete knew too, in a more abstract way. He knew that it would have to end one way or another, he knew that Frank wouldn’t stop until something forced him to.

Pretending otherwise was always,  _ always  _ going to set him up for this. It was just naivety to think otherwise -- naivety and his own stupid,  _ useless  _ optimism.

“We’re the only two people in this city who’d be dumb enough to miss him, so why should it matter?” 

Wiping his eyes, a wet laugh pushes past Pete’s lips, and he sinks against the wall.

“And you’re not even a person,” he adds. “At least you’ve got an excuse.”

  
  


\--

  
  


“Would you ever give it up?”

At the work desk by the window, Pete is so involved with what he’s doing that he almost misses the question. It isn’t anything overtly frustrating tonight: upgrades to existing gadgets mostly, fine tuning his webshooters and the like, so getting into the process of it is a familiar catharsis. Frank’s voice, gravelly and quiet from the other side of the room, is familiar too -- although the question isn’t.

“You looking for a fight?” Pete queries back, turning just slightly to glance at the man currently inhabiting his couch. It doesn’t sound like he is, though; there’s a gentle kind of curiosity in Frank’s tone that Pete isn’t used to. He’s not entirely sure how to respond to it, hence the jump.

He barely sees Frank shake his head, having turned back to the wiring in front of him.

“No,” comes the answer, then after a pause: “You’re different than most of them. Was thinking about it. That’s all.”

“What’s that mean?”

It’s no secret how Frank feels about... most of their kind: the vigilantes and capes crowding the streets. To him, everyone is inefficient, soft -- plus disorganized and self important on top of that, and the combination gets Frank’s hackles up on sight. Pete’s always assumed that he falls into that same category; that he’s tolerated for mostly unrelated reasons. It doesn’t bother him much -- if he cared about half of what people thought of him, he’d have quit before he stopped his first bank robbery.

But Frank says he’s different.

Curiosity piqued, he spins in his desk chair, turning to peer at Frank where he sits. When Pete turns to look at him, he looks away as if caught, rubbing a hand over his own jaw. There’s a book open next to him, face down against the arm of the couch, as if he’d stopped to speak, and the end of a glass of scotch on the coffee table in front of him. 

“What’s that mean?” Pete repeats, still watching the rare softness of the picture in front of him, the way Frank doesn’t seem to feel the smile that wants to pull at his own mouth. Pete wants to cross the room and push his nose into the grey hair dusting Frank’s temple -- but he wants an answer more, so he holds out.

The answer seems to get rolled around in Frank’s mouth before he finally speaks, jaw moving as he deliberates over his choice of word and whether or not he wants to give it up.

“Brighter,” comes the reply. When he looks up at Pete it feels as if he’s looking into him, thoughtful, like he’s trying to figure out what exactly he’s seeing. Slowly, Frank taps two fingers to his own chest, over his heart. “Different.” 

The livingroom is the biggest space in the apartment and it’s still small enough that a few steps is enough to cross it. The sun will be coming up soon; Pete should finish his repairs before the day hits but he won’t. It seems like an impossible task with Frank looking at him like that.

“Who’d keep you in check if I quit?” Pete says quietly, knees sinking into the couch.

Frank raises a hand to the side of his face, warm and uncommonly tender. That gives him away as being drunk, just a little, just enough. As a rule, Frank isn’t handsy, and he’s certainly not one to indulge the kind of sentimentality that Pete suspects he keeps locked away. He does tonight though; thumb following the line of Pete’s jaw, brushing carefully over a stray smatter of freckles near Pete’s cheek.

“This city’d go to Hell without me,” Pete mumbles. “I couldn’t quit if I tried.”

The half truth of responsibility, with the rest lingering unspoken underneath: the air on his face when he swings, the adrenaline that makes his blood sing, night after night. 

“Good,” says Frank, and he still tastes warm and bitter when Pete kisses him.

\--

  
  


The snow is starting to thaw out, leaving the streets caked with slush and mud. Pete can’t complain; he’ll take mild and wet over the freezing bite of wind on his face any day, and it means that the aches in his joints will be easing up soon.

Max feels the same way, if the content way he trots at Pete’s side is any indication. The winter has been hard on both of them. For a while the dog was starting to show his age so much that Pete was worried it would be too much for him, that he’d be coming out the other side on his own, but as the temperature has started to go up, so have Max’s spirits.

“Do dogs get seasonal depression?” Pete asks him, chatting away at his companion as they walk. “Maybe next winter I’ll see if the vet will get you some puppy prozac. That’s probably a thing, right? People are crazy enough. We’re almost through it now, buddy.”

As always, Pete feels his stomach do a familiar lurch as they round the next corner. It’s not so devastating as it was a few months ago, not quite enough to knock him completely off his feet anymore, but it’s still there. It still twists sharp in his chest, even if Max doesn’t fuss quite as much as he used to when they pass by his old haunt. 

Some days, they can make it through the whole walk without him pulling at all, as if he’s finally started to settle in to the life that Pete’s brought him into. 

The seasons are changing. That’s enough to pull Pete towards a dim light at the end of the dark tunnel, to make him start to feel like there’s something worth hoping for again. Soon the sun will come up, and they’ll keep moving along the way that they always do, out of the cold and into something warmer. Something brighter.

They’re almost past the block before he lets himself glance up, something wistful pulling his gaze higher. Stopping dead in his tracks, Pete stares, optimism starting like a low burn in his belly and then quickly making its way up to choke his throat.

There’s a light on in Frank’s apartment window.

  
  
  



End file.
